Risk and liberal peace: democratisation as risk management

Abstract

This paper argues that democratisation is characterised by risk management. Democratisation aims not only to manage the risks to global security believed to emerge from the borderlands. Rather, as a complex of depoliticised strategies, democratisation advances a set of technocratic solutions to administer local populations who are constructed as risky, in particular, prone to conflict and extremism. Yet, efforts to manage risk beget new risks to be managed, rendering democratisation a self-defeating and interminable project. This interminability perpetually defers democracy for (‘riskised’) local populations that are constructed as unfit for democracy; thus, democratisation emerges as a quasi-permanent modality of global governance. This article reviews risk in democratisation discourse through three illustrative examples: the discourses of electoral risk, the risk of freedom and the risk of inclusion.

Keywords:

• risk
• risk management
• riskisation
• democratisation
• liberal peace
• borderlands

Acknowledgements

The author thanks anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that improved this paper.

Notes

1. See Paris (2011) for a critique of the comparison between today’s interventionism and colonialism.

2. Barkawi and Laffey’s (1999, 409) discussion highlights that the triumph of a liberal conception of democracy was not inevitable, but an historical artifact that ‘“defines out” other historically valid claims’ on the meaning of ‘rule of the people’ (Barkawi and Laffey, 1999, 407).

3. There have been at least three special issues in IR journals devoted to risk in the last half decade: (1) Global Society’s special issue on ‘Risk and International Relations: A New Research Agenda?’ 2007, volume 21, issue 1; (2) Security Dialogue’s special issue on ‘Security, Technologies of Risk and the Political’ 2008, volume 39, issues 2-3; and, (3) International Relations’s special issue on ‘Risk, Risk Management and International Relations’ 2011, volume 25, issue 3.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Augustine S.J. Park

Augustine S.J. Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Her areas of specialisation are critical studies of liberal interventionism, transitional justice, global Southern/othered childhoods and race/racism. Her current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the meanings invested in the missing remains of dead victims of state violence.